Zythos IPA

I got an email from Tom Kunkle saying that there will be an informal gathering of home brewers in the valley. It was decided to brew an IPA and the get together will be Feb 1st I think. Or March 1st. I can't remember. I'm hoping this will the beginning of a Ridgecrest home brew club of some sort where we get together a few times a year and try each others' beer and give feedback.

I went with the Zythos IPA kit from More Beer. Zythos is a new IPA style hop from New Zealand. Eager to try it. Here is the breakdown:

13lbs 2row
1lb Munich
8oz Crystal 40L
8oz Carapils

1oz Zythos 10%AA @ 60mins, 20mins, and 5mins
2oz Zythos 10%AA @ 1min and dry hop

Whirlfloc @ 10min
Servomyces @ 10 min

5 Gallons Ridgecrest filtered water
5 Gallons Distilled
16 grams Gypsum

Drop hop after 7 days for 10 days.

WLP004 x2 Irish Ale CHPPIGCCE810-13 (no starter)

Lots of changes in the Avery brewery. Let's start with this:

Ellie's sister Lizz (who BTW always messes with me when she calls herself Laura) has moved back to the US. She brought very few things and needed some furniture which Ellie and I donated. So the chairs and the table that I annexed for the use in the Brewery have left me. That didn't make me too sad. But it was cool when Ellie showed up after Christmas with four chairs and new table from Costco. Nice!


Secondly, I got a grain mill. Check it out:

I just now fired it up and it crushed grain like a boss. I think it did too good of a job as the grain looks more like powder then grain but we will go with it today and adjust the rollers next time. Here is pic of the grain milled by More Beer in the bag in the bucket with my crush. I hope you can see the difference.

Next bit of change is that I am no longer buying spring water from the store. I will now be making my own water from this point forward. I have found a nice website to help me out. They can be found at http://www.brewersfriend.com/water-chemistry/. Since I have access to the Ridgecrest water report online I was able to ask the website to give an IPA friendly water profile and then I changed around parameters until they matched up. I will need about 50% distilled water, 50% Ridgecrest water, and 16g of Gypsum . What make water IPA friendly. I guess it has a lot to do with the Sulfite to Chloride ratio. Below is a pic of the website with all the info added.

12:26 - I have crushed the grain and am now boiling the O2 stone.

12:37 - I'm now filling one of my fermenters with 5 gallons of filtered water. Also, since I'm going to be boiling water, I figured I would calibrate my steel thermometer.

12:59 - Cars moved out. Boiled kettle has PBW in it. Will run it through the pump as soon as I have water built up.

1:41 - All is well. The water is heating up. Some quick math found that I needed 16g of gypsum for 10 gallons of 50/50 distilled/RC water. This would mean 1.6g per gallon. So I put 6 gallons in the pot and measured out .35oz which I hope is near 9g. Boiling pot is ready. Mash tun is assembled and ready. Need to get the mash tun to 166F for the dough in. I'll shoot a little high since correcting lower is way easier.

2:06 - Ellie has brought me a sandwich. I love her. I hit my mash temp. 153F. The pH measures out at 5.2ish on its own so I will not add any stabilizer. Had a leak in the mash tun when I first put the water in. That was annoying since I was sure I checked it. No matter. I got the wrench and tightened it down. Seems fine now.

2:42 - Cleaned the mill. Swept the floor. Ate my sandwich. Cracked my first beer. Ellie came back from Tracy with Black Star Double Hopped Golden Lager. It's ok. I've also fired up some Brewing Network on the headphones. The weather is nice. Life is good.

3:49 - Mash and sparge done. I put 0.5 gallons in the batch sparge first and ran it off. During this time I heated up the sparge water to boiling. I was supposed to add 4.5 gallons more but after 3 gallons the mash tun was now 170F so I ran that off and cooled the sparge water. Then I added two more gallons at 170F and ran that off. The preboil OG is 1.055.

4:39 - Hot break done. Well into the boil. Cleaned the mash tun. All is going well. I think I'm going to come in under gravity which I'm ok with. I don't want an OG 1.075 beer. So, I held back a little of the bittering hops.

5:01 - Feeling lazy today. I don't think I'm going to fire up the pumps. I'm gonna let the thing cool to 100F all on it own. Then use the ice bucket and pump the coils manually. I've also setup the boil kettle by the basin so I can have the output water run into it. I was concerned that I would light myself on fire but it hasn't happened yet. Also, I went in to give Ellie kisses and she was napping with the dog.

6:33 - All went well. Having the setup by the basin I think this is a good thing. The don't use pump method seems to work pretty good. Got a nice cold break and gave the sample to Ellie. She seems really excited about the wort. I've been working on her palette and today she nailed it. She said it was good and hits up in the back. Awesome. After I heard her feedback I instantly knew she was right. I took a sip anyway to confirm. It was smooth in the front and had a bitter finish. I look forward to seeing how this translates to the final brew.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I gave her the water I built and she gave good feedback too. She mentioned that it tasted like well water. That's not the word she used but when I said well water she said yep. Tells me a couple of things. First, if I ever start a brewery in this valley I've got to drill a well. Second, the Ellie feedback experiment is coming along well. I need someone who thinks Tapatio and lime tastes good, which is not me, to tell me what kind of beer is good beer. Up until now Tuey has been this. He says --fill in the blank-- and I go, oh yeah, I never would have gotten that. I need someone who I have access to on demand to give such feedback.

Cleaning up now. Drank all those lagers. Now onto a belgian from the "The Bruery". I getting drunk. Sometimes when this happens I get in a non-compliant mood with the wife. No longer do I pick my battles. All things are worth fighting about. I hope we just make the love and watch bad TV. We'll see.

Kegged Cider

Today I put Spike Ale II into eight flip top bottles. Once that was done there was about 2 quarts left in the keg. Since the cider has been lazy man style up until now anyway I figured that I would just dump the cider in. Before that though I added 2 quarts of apple juice to sweeten it up. Once it all got in there I tried some and it tasted sweet. But good.

One thing I'd like to note it that I am used to beer fermenting in a week or so and then it is done. In this case I checked the cider at 1 week and it was perfect so I left it. A week after that, a little tart. Today, very tart. I check the gravity today and it was 1.000. This cider fermented very slowly. It just kept going and going. It fermented everything and took three weeks to do it. Interesting.

So it's in the fridge now. I'm hoping this puts the yeast to sleep and they will not ferment the new apple juice. Actually it would be ok it if did. It may be a little too sweet.

Stout tasting notes

The stout has come out good. It has a smooth roasty taste and is a little sweet. It looks dark with a dark brown head and smells roasty. All the feedback I've gotten from other say pretty much the same. The only thing I am sad about is there appears to be no hint of vanilla. I think I need to scrape the beans when I put them into the fermenter. The other route to go that I've read on the internets is to soak the beans in vodka for a couple of weeks and then pour that into the beer. Still another method is to just add extract when all is said and done. I pulled out some extract and added a drop to a glass I have and it was very good. I have half a mind to add a bunch to the keg but Pooley said we shouldn't go trying to fix beer that ain't broke. Tuey agreed and so I guess I will wait for another time.

One thing I would like to make note of here. The roasty is not harsh. It is very smooth. I think part of the reason for this is that when I thought I need to raise the temp I pulled out the thick part of the mash and boiled it to up the temp. Thus creating a kind of decoction mash that I think was reason for the smoothness of this beer. This further makes me want to try a at least a double decoction one day and see how it comes out.

Beer Trip

Took a beer trip to San Diego. First stop was Stone Brew. That place was amazing. First we had food which was a little bit hipster but still good. I guess I'm an old fashioned burger and brat kind of guy. Then we went on the tour. It was cool to see the large fermenters and such. They claim to be brewing beer 24/7. If I remember right they are the 10th or so largest in the US and they really didn't enormous or anything. It looked like they had 20 or so 100bbl fermenters. When the tour was over we sat and drank some more. The beer list they had was amazing. Beers I had only heard about. If we had known better we would have just stayed here all weekend.

Then we went to White Labs. One thing I really wanted to do was to taste the beer that was made using the same wort and various yeast. What I found really surprised me. The difference in taste was quite small. Not as dramatic as I had thought it would be. Another thing that blew my mind was that they fermented all the beer at 66-68F. Even the lagers. I tried the Cal Common wort with the various yeasts and the best one was the Mexican Lager. Claresta thought so too. Crazy that the best beer was a lager fermented at ale temps. Makes me wonder if either all this fuss about keeping the lagers cold is overrated or if Mexi Lager is just the bomb diggity.

After we sampled we took a tour of the lab. Here's the other thing that surprises me. This place supplied a crap ton of yeast to craft brewers and they exists in a very modest establishment in a nondescript industrial complex full of warehouse type looking buildings. They we pretty tight lipped about a bunch of stuff but it was cool to learn a little more about the place.

When we finished there we said goodbye to Clacob and went to Green Flash. This was recommended by Justin. We got there and had a beer and ate food. The burrito wagon that was there was great. I really wasn't a huge fan of the beer. I don't think Ellie was either. We took a tour of this place as well and found it very similar as Stone. The girl there was mean as hell. I haven't seen Justin in months and we would start chatting and she would get irritated. Whatevs. Mike Burton and Rob were there too. It was nice to see them.

Afterwards Ellie and I made the drive home which was tiring. That drive is too long for a day trip. I don't think we will ever do it in one day again. I guess Ellie and I are getting too old. We had fun though and I'm glad we went.

Stout kegged, cider, Loggy taste test

Today I kegged the stout. It went pretty smooth. I notices the vanilla beans were floating around in there. I look forward to trying it tomorrow. It should be raining tomorrow. Maybe I snuggle up with the wife after work and we try it together.

After it was kegged I poured 3-4 gallons of unfiltered apple cider on it. I just the stuff that was only pasteurized (not from concentrate, no preservatives). We'll see how it comes out. I'm guessing it will come out a little dry but I think it may pick up some character from the stout which would be cool. If it does come out too dry I think I will pour another quart or so of apple juice in it to sweeten it up and keg it.

The Christmas beer was sampled today. It is still very young but I it is very boozy. The current gravity is 1.022 which gives an ABV of 9.5%. Crazy! I hope it mellows. I may need to leave it in the fermenter for a while. It fermented very aggressively for the the first few days. I couldn't get it cool enough. It got up to 73F.  The room it was in was probably 60F. It blew yeast all over the place and made a mess everywhere too. If I ever make a beer that big again I think I will HAVE to use the chest freezer.